Waiting to be Heard, by Amanda Knox, review

Amanda Knox has signed a book deal reportedly woth £2.6 millionPhoto: Reuters

By Tobias Jones

7:00AM BST 14 May 2013

The murder of the British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia in 2007 is likely to remain one of those iconic mysteries that will never be satisfactorily resolved. Amanda Knox was originally convicted of her murder along with two other men (her boyfriend, Raffaele Sollecito, and Ivorian Rudy Guede) in 2009; she was then cleared on appeal, although that appeal was quashed in March and a retrial is currently pending.

Public opinion has been divided. Britons have largely trusted the prosecution and assumed that “foxy Knoxy”, the icy femme fatale, was guilty. Americans have been forthright in her defence. And in Italy, opinion is divided right down the middle, with many (due to a jaundiced view of Italian justice) convinced of her innocence, while others (due to anti-American prejudice) sure of her guilt. When she was acquitted, thousands of Italians outside the court booed loudly at the perception that justice had kowtowed to American might.

Waiting to be Heard is Knox’s adamant defence. She paints a self-portrait of a kooky, naive girl whose nickname “Foxy” was earned on the soccer pitch, not in the boudoir. It’s true she slept with four men within a short space of time in Italy, but like many people far from home for the first time, she wasn’t sexually voracious, she says, simply experimenting.

It often makes for pretty toe-curling reading. One can imagine the publishers dragging salacious details from her, with the result that one gets glimpses of intimacy far better left private: of her encounter with Cristiano, a man she met on a train, she writes: “we didn’t have a condom, so we didn’t actually have intercourse. But we were making out, fooling around like crazy…” We hear about her contracting oral herpes, about getting hives, and having her ears cleaned with a cotton bud by Raffaele. There’s a strategic honesty to the book: having lied to police about smoking pot, among other things, Knox is now blunt: “around our house, marijuana was as common as pasta”.

The book becomes compelling, however, once that carefree life is replaced by the nightmare of her friend’s murder and a dawning sense that she is in the frame. She’s sleep-deprived, has no lawyer, is struggling to respond to questions in a language she barely knows. She’s strip searched and feels intimidated to such an extent she makes up stuff about Patrick, a man for whom she worked as a waitress. “I felt oddly small,” she says, “like Alice in Wonderland, when everything around her was so much bigger.” If true, the book is an eloquent indictment of Italy’s provincial police.

Knox’s wildly inappropriate actions were what first aroused the suspicions of the police. She was canoodling with Sollecito outside the murder scene; doing splits and cartwheels in the police station; she went “ta-dah” when she was kitted out with protective boots and gloves on returning to the murder scene; she wrote in her diary she could “kill for a pizza” on the day Kercher was murdered. In a land slavishly conformist when it comes to what’s considered appropriate behaviour, one can understand why police took a dim view of such antics.

Knox’s contention is that not only were the investigators pretty insensitive in their methods, but also that the chief prosecutor, Giuliano Mignini, was a fantasist with a track record for constructing conspiracy theories. Mignini linked the Monster of Florence murders with an all-powerful secret sect, and he had been found guilty in 2010 of “exceeding the powers of his office”. On thin evidence, Mignini hypothesised that Knox and Sollecito had with Guede subjected Kercher to gang rape.

The account of the investigation, the separation from friends and family and the erosion of dignity and hope as Knox is almost buried alive, is grim. The cruelty of prison officials who make passes at or crudely grab hold of her and pretend she’s contracted HIV, is relentless. The police sue her for slander. Knox spends 1,427 nights behind bars, much of the time thinking she’ll spend 26 years there. Whatever the truth, it’s a tragic story. Kercher died a horrific death, and if Knox is innocent, she has suffered horribly. The alternative is almost as ghastly: if she’s not so innocent, she’s hoodwinked the world, landed a $4 million book deal and launched what will doubtless be a profitable writing career.

An irony is that Waiting to be Heardwon’t actually be heard in the UK. The book has been published around the world, but not here because of our absurd libel laws. There were fears that Knox’s acerbic comments about Italian prosecutors would prove libellous. (In February Mignini sued Sollecito for defamation after the publication of his book Honour Bound.) Britain used to pride itself on being a bastion of free speech, but our libel laws force publishers to be cautious. It’s nothing compared to the injustice of Kercher’s death and – depending on your point of view – Knox’s imprisonment, but the book’s non-publication shows that here, too, the law is often an ass.